There is a Tesla New Buyers delivery checklist you can find online that was written by a group of Tesla enthusiasts. Just a few years ago one of the items on the checklist was “Make sure you can put the car in Park (and that it stays parked)”. (Ref: https://driveteslacanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tesla-Model-3-Delivery-Checklist.pdf).

I’m not away of any other car where this was something people had to check before delivery — apparently it was a bit of a common problem for a time. That seems absolutely crazy to me, and a major failure of QA as it poses a significant safety hazard.

(1812 wasn’t Canadians, it was the British)

This isn’t accurate in the slightest. Fencible and Militia units were formed in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Canadas (upper and lower) from local civilians, who fought in a variety of battles throughout 1812. These civilians were in fact called “Canadians” at the time as well.

And that’s to say nothing of all of the Native peoples of Upper and Lower Canada who aided in the fight.

Ultimately the British held command, but many, many Canadians participated and were involved as well.

The big problem here is that we’re eventually going to hit global peak oil use. Building out new infrastructure like this takes nearly a decade to complete, and paying it off usually takes multiple decades. If it’s going to take you 20 years at 100% capacity to pay off, and 10 years to build, and we reach peak oil earlier than 30 years from now (the IEA predicts 2030, however other international agencies push that out as far as 2050), then building extra capacity just doesn’t make sense.

If the IEA models are correct, then we wouldn’t even be finished expanding or building any new pipelines before global oil demand starts to drop. That risks a big drop in prices, which makes it more difficult to pay off any new pipelines once they come online as transit fees bottom out. And then taxpayers are stuck holding the bag.

They are, but you still need baseload. Solar and wind are great — when it’s daytime and/or the wind is blowing. Coal (and natural gas, hydro, and nuclear) can provide more scalable power on demand. These fill in the gaps for times when solar and wind production are lower.

But China isn’t likely to convert existing coal plants to natural gas. If they wanted to do that they could do it already — they have an LNG pipeline from Siberia. But instead of replacing existing coal power plants, China keeps approving new ones — it was reported last year they were approving two new coal fired plants per week. So even if they increased their LNG imports (they’re looking to open a second pipeline with Russia on the western side of the country), those coal plants aren’t going anywhere — with the rate they’re building new power plants, they’re not likely to be “upgrading” any coal plants to LNG anytime soon — they’ll just build additional LNG plants (and likely further coal plants) alongside those existing coal plants instead.

Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.

Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.

(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).

Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.

(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).

This is how the LNG argument typically goes: if we build up LNG capacity, we can ship it to China who can use it to replace coal burning power plants which emit significantly more CO2 than LNG fired plants do.

That sounds nice — but do we have any_ commitments from China that this would actually happen? Or is it more likely that they’ll just build more LNG capacity on top of their existing coal capacity?

To me, the latter seems more likely than the former.

The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).

That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.

Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.